Some people spend years, even decades, trying to fix themselves. They work on their anxiety, their relationships, their self-esteem. They try therapy, journaling, meditation. They make progress, lose ground, make progress again. And underneath all of it, there’s a quiet question that never quite goes away. For some, the answer may lie in the lasting effects of Big T Trauma, experiences that continue to shape thoughts, emotions, and behaviours long after the event itself has passed.

Why is this so hard for me when it doesn’t seem this hard for everyone else?

If that question is familiar, it might be worth pausing on something that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. Not because the answer changes everything overnight. But because sometimes, understanding where something comes from is the first real step toward not being ruled by it.

There’s more than one kind of trauma

The word trauma gets used a lot these days, and that’s not a bad thing. Awareness matters. But one of the side effects of a word becoming more common is that it can start to feel like it only applies to extreme situations. Like it’s a word for other people. People who’ve been through things you haven’t.

What’s less discussed is that trauma exists on a spectrum. The end of the spectrum we’re talking about today, what some psychologists call Big T Trauma, is far more common than most people realise.

Big T Trauma refers to events that are deeply threatening to your life, your safety, or your sense of the world as a place where you are protected. These are experiences that overwhelm your capacity to cope at the time they happen. Not because you’re weak. But because what happened was genuinely overwhelming. For more information on trauma and its effects on mental health, see NIMH: Trauma and PTSD

The kinds of events that tend to fall into this category include serious accidents or injuries, physical or sexual assault, witnessing violence, the sudden or traumatic loss of someone close to you, natural disasters, war or conflict, childhood abuse or neglect, or experiences of racial violence and discrimination. Childhood abuse or neglect can have long-lasting effects that continue into adulthood, making healing from childhood trauma an important part of recovery for many people.

This is different from what’s sometimes called small t trauma, the more chronic, cumulative wounds that come from things like emotional unavailability in childhood, persistent criticism, or ongoing instability. Both matter. Both leave marks. But Big T Trauma tends to produce a particular set of responses that are worth understanding on their own terms.

What it can look like from the inside

Here’s the thing about Big T Trauma: it doesn’t always announce itself as trauma. Often it announces itself as anxiety. Or depression. Or anger that feels out of proportion. Or a numbness you can’t quite explain. If you’ve ever wondered about the connection between anxiety and past experiences, understanding the relationship between anxiety and trauma can offer valuable insight.

I’ve always been like this. It’s just my personality.

That thought is more common than you’d think. And it makes sense. If the nervous system has been in a heightened state for long enough, it starts to feel like baseline. Like just the way you are.

Some of the signs that unprocessed trauma might be at the root of what you’re experiencing include:

• Feeling on edge or hypervigilant. Always scanning for what might go wrong, never quite able to relax even when there’s no obvious reason not to.
• Intrusive thoughts or memories. Images, sensations, or fragments of the past arriving without warning, often triggered by something that seems unrelated.
• Avoiding things. People, places, situations, conversations, without always being able to explain why.
• Emotional responses that feel out of proportion. A strong physical reaction to something minor, tears that arrive unexpectedly, anger that surprises even you.
• Difficulty trusting, difficulty feeling safe, difficulty believing that good things will last.

Sleep problems, difficulty concentrating, or a sense of disconnection from yourself or from what’s happening around you, almost as though you’re watching your own life from a slight distance.

None of these signs in isolation confirms trauma. But if several of them feel familiar and you know there are things in your past that were genuinely frightening or destabilising, it may be worth sitting with that connection.

What if this isn’t a character flaw? What if it’s a response?

The cultural context that makes this harder

For a lot of women, particularly Black women, there are layers on top of all of this that make recognising trauma even more complicated.

Many of us were raised in communities where endurance is a virtue and talking about pain is coded as weakness. Where the instruction, spoken or unspoken, is to keep going. To not dwell. To be strong.

And there’s a specific kind of experience, racial trauma, that can sit in the Big T category and yet rarely gets named as such. Being on the receiving end of racial violence, discrimination, or the chronic stress of navigating spaces where you are othered: these experiences can produce the same neurological and psychological responses as any other form of trauma. But they often go unacknowledged, even in therapeutic settings.

The result is that a lot of women arrive at midlife carrying something they’ve never had the language for. Something they’ve managed around, worked through, built their lives in spite of, but never actually addressed.

Maybe I’ve been coping. But have I ever actually healed?

That’s not a question designed to alarm you. It’s an invitation. Because recognising something is not the same as being undone by it. In fact, it’s usually the opposite.

What seeking help can look like

There is no single path through trauma. What matters is finding something, and importantly someone, that takes your experience seriously.

Trauma-informed therapy is worth seeking out specifically. Not all therapeutic approaches are equally equipped to work with trauma, and it’s reasonable to ask a therapist directly whether they work in a trauma-informed way. Approaches like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), somatic therapy, and trauma-focused CBT have strong evidence behind them and are available in the UK through both NHS and private routes.

Community matters too, more than clinical language often acknowledges. The experience of being witnessed, of telling your story to someone who doesn’t flinch, is itself part of healing. Community support can play a vital role in recovery, particularly when people are working through collective trauma and learning how to rebuild a sense of safety and connection.

And then there’s the body. Big T Trauma lives in the body as much as the mind. Movement, breathwork, and practices that return you to a sense of safety in your own physical self can be part of the work in ways that talk therapy alone sometimes can’t reach.

None of this is quick. But all of it is possible.

If you’re somewhere in the process of trying to understand your own story, where your anxiety comes from, what it’s connected to, what it might be trying to protect you from, the How Did I Get Here? journal was created for exactly that kind of reflection. It’s for anyone sitting with anxiety that has roots, whatever those roots look like. You can find it at samanthiaclarke.com/shop.

If you want to sit with this

Writing can be a way of getting closer to things you haven’t quite been able to look at directly yet. Not to fix them. Just to see them more clearly.

If something in this piece stirred something in you, you might try putting it down on paper without pressure, without an agenda.

Something in my past that I’ve always described as “fine” or “dealt with,” but never really looked at closely, is…

The sign from this piece that feels most familiar to me is…

When I hear “this is just who I am,” what comes to mind is…

What it would mean to consider that some of what I carry might not be my fault is…

One small step I could take toward understanding my own story better is…